Vol. VII, No. 19 - October 15, 2025
No matter how hard Marcos Jr. tries to distance himself from the corruption scandal that has engulfed his regime, his whitewashing attempts have only exposed him as the king of corruption in the Philippines. By launching a supposed anti-corruption crusade against the Dutertes and their allies, Marcos Jr. ended up unmasking a vast network of corruption-ridden infrastructure projects and padded budgets that lead directly to his own office.
Based on congressional investigations, Marcos Jr. approved 1,889 public works projects worth P61.4 billion in 2023 sourced from so-called unprogrammed appropriations. In 2024, this ballooned to P153 billion for a total of 1,811 projects. In total, some 3,700 projects across two years, valued at P214.4 billion, were funded through these opaque allocations – many of them flood-control projects, road construction, and multipurpose buildings.
In the 2025 national budget, a staggering P243.2 billion are unprogrammed funds, accounting for approximately 3.6% of the total budget. The 2026 budget also includes P243 billion in unprogrammed appropriations in addition to the P10.7 billion in confidential and intelligence funds under the Office of the President.
Unprogrammed appropriations (UAs) are lump-sum allocations that are deliberately crafted to lack line-item transparency, oversight or public scrutiny. Moreover, all expenditures from these lump-sum appropriations can only be released through Special Budget Requests (SBRs) which requires the approval of no other than Marcos Jr. himself.
In addition to billions of unprogrammed funds under his control, Marcos Jr. has also been using the Maharlika Investment Fund as a conduit for plunder by diverting pension funds and seed capital from public banks into opaque ventures managed by his cronies and loyalists.
On the other hand, the Dutertes in their effort to focus only on the corruption during the Marcos regime, found themselves implicated as among the major corrupt contractors in many anomalous public works projects, and other anomalous high profile cases especially during the Covid pandemic when the Duterte clique looted the billions of funds intended for the fight against Covid.
From the Marcos fascist dictatorship to the Duterte regime and now the Marcos Jr. administration, this systemic corruption has been institutionalized through political patronage, opaque budget appropriations, and vast pork-barrel networks. The massive corruption schemes under the Marcos Jr. regime exposes the structural workings of bureaucrat capitalism, where the state functions as a business meant to funnel public resources to private wealth.
The explosion of popular outrage against the recent expose of blatant and widespread corruption was expressed by more than a hundred thousand protestors, composed mainly by the youth last September 21, the 53rd anniversary of Marcos Sr.’s martial rule. Protest actions against corruption has been sustained in the whole country.
In order to defeat bureaucrat capitalism, the popular outrage of the masses must be translated to a revolutionary force capable of overthrowing the current ruling system. This means waging the national democratic revolution in order to uproot the three basic problems of Philippine society; to defeat feudalism which is the social base that feeds US imperialist domination, to overthrow bureaucrat capitalism that feeds on the exploitation and oppression of the people, and to free the country from the clutches of US imperialism.